Helen Raikes' Career Celebration 

You are invited to join the Department of Child, Youth and Family Studies at a reception honoring the amazing career of Willa Cather Professor Dr. Helen Raikes.  

Helen H. Raikes, Ph.D., is Willa Cather Professor of Child, Youth and Family Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.  At the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, her area of study is early childhood education, largely focused on using research to improve outcomes and opportunities for low-income children before school begins and on optimizing growth trajectories of children’s early emotional, language and physiological development.   Her current research projects include evaluation of the Lincoln Educare program and of Save the Children’s Early Steps to School Success home visiting program in rural US communities. She was a Co-PI for a study of Early Head Start and childcare partnerships within the Educare Learning Network and was PI for the Midwest Child Care Research Consortium which investigated quality and workforce characteristics of early childhood education workforce in four Midwestern states.  She has received awards for research, teaching and mentoring and is author of two books and over a hundred scholarly articles.  She is a frequent presenter on early childhood, Head Start and child care research projects, and provided leadership for the Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project, begun when she was a Society for Research in Child Development Executive Policy Fellow at the Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and years beyond the fellowship.  Recently, she completed a cross cultural study of low-income children’s self-regulation with collaborators in Ankara, Turkey, and is involved in projects in Colombia, and Rwanda. In Nebraska, she serves on boards of directors for Nebraska Children and Families Foundation, Sixpence Early Childhood Partnership, Lincoln Community Foundation and the Buffett Early Childhood Fund. She practices yoga.